As promised, here's my Diablo III Beta Preview, based on some hands-on time with the closed beta of Blizzard's upcoming action/RPG sequel. I had fun playing the beta and writing the piece, and again marvel at how people can write comprehensive reviews of full games when it took me so long to get this out based on a beta that can be completed in three hours. Thanks to my friends MrKawfy and Overthecledge for playing with me and to MrsBlue for her invaluable proofreading. Here's a sample:

There is less fear of making mistakes that will go on your permanent record and follow you around for the rest of your life, as my elementary school principal used to say. There are no choices for characteristics—this is all automatic. As you level up, you earn active and passive skills but you can change them any time you want. Skills are no longer tree-based, so you don't have to pick a crappy one to get the better one that follows. The death penalty is now almost non-existent: You respawn at the last checkpoint with a ten-percent loss of durability to your equipment, which seems fairly trivial and removes the fear of venturing too far past your current abilities. I find this regrettable: One of the most memorable experiences of my gaming life was a late night when my party got killed in the depths of a Diablo dungeon: We literally spent hours working out how to retrieve our items from where they dropped. I prefer it much more where you dread dying, but I don't know how realistic it is to expect this to be changed.

such as that blizzard can't trust people to pick their own attributes. They've literally said so in interviews.

No they haven't. They said that attributes fell into one of two categories 99% of the time (enough str to wear gear, max vit, or enough str to wear gear, enough dex for max block, max vit). If 99% of the time everyone was going to do the same thing, there's no point in having variety, because no one is taking advantage of the variety.

Making more money means making diablo look more like WoW with brighter colors to appeal to the WoW audience.

I've watched quite a few of the Diablo III videos, and in none of them did it look like WoW. The flavour, feel and colour of the game was all very similar to Diablo II.